Hello world 😉

Right then. I’ve been saying I’ll start a proper blog for years. The thing is, I do a lot of stuff across a lot of different areas and none of the usual places quite fit all of it. LinkedIn is fine for the professional bits. X/Twitter is a mess. And Instagram isn’t exactly the right home for 3,000 words on activity theory.

So here we are. My own corner of the internet.

I’m Matt Smith. I’m based in Bridgend in South Wales. By day I’m the eLearning Systems and Content Manager at the Royal College of Midwives, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn, what technology can do to help that, and why the gap between those two things is still so wide. I’m also a PhD candidate at Lancaster University, looking at technology-enhanced learning and e-Research supervised by Dr Brett Bligh, who somehow still takes my calls.

Alongside the day job, I run Camino Learning Collective, a small learning technology consultancy with two arms: Camino Learning Studio, which does learning experience design, and Camino Learning Lab, which works on emerging technology strategy. I’m also a voluntary board director at eIntegrity Healthcare, because apparently I don’t have enough on.

I hold dual UK–Spanish citizenship, which becomes relevant later.

Here’s what I’m planning to write about:

Learning Technologies – the stuff I work on, think about, and occasionally get frustrated by. eLearning, AI, instructional design, Moodle, the gap between what technology promises and what it actually delivers.

PhD – the honest account of doing a doctorate while holding down a full-time job. The reading, the thinking, the existential crises, the occasional breakthrough.

Music & Gigs – I go to a lot of gigs. Mostly metal and punk, but not exclusively. I’ll write about what I see.

Travel – we travel when we can. Spain features heavily. That Spanish passport isn’t just decorative.

General stuff – everything else. Side projects, things I’ve built, things I’ve broken, opinions I’ve formed.

None of this is going to be polished content marketing. It’s just me writing about things that interest me, in the hope that some of it is useful or interesting to someone else.

That’s it, really.

Matt